I posted this before but in this context it may be worth sharing again:
My process basically involved recording a lot of different sounds (using Ableton) from an inexpensive PCM keyboard and fading them in and out very slowly. Even just listening to a single track of it while I was recording was pretty meditative - after a few minutes you start hearing interesting things in it.
Part of why I made this is that I wanted to stop gassing over the Solar 50. It’s a neat device but not quite as versatile as I’d like for the cost. I’m stubborn and I wanted to prove to myself that I don’t need a bunch of super fancy equipment to get an interesting result.
Maybe for you a really tactile midi controller would be a good way to use what you have already to have a meditative workflow? Once you get stuff set up in your Ableton project, you could be fading tracks up and down, slowly adjusting parameters of your effects, etc.
Oscillator Sync had a nice video on drones with Digitone not too long ago which is has some generally useful advice: move slowly, but always be moving.
Of course, you could just forget about everything I just said and get a Lyra-8. I don’t have one, but I’ve seen a lot of posts about how meditative it is to use.
If you can take a bit of dissonance, playing two close pitches (like no more than a tone apart) in the same (or very similar) patch does great things in drones. Two low pitches will clash and make your speakers bubble and fart. It’s even better if one detunes around the other. I’ve heard that some of the pieces of a gamelan are deliberately paired, but ever-so-slightly detuned against one another so that the pitch to focus on when you listen to them isn’t the pitch of the tines, it’s the wobble of their clash. Binaural beats kinda work this way too (but theoretically just below the threshold of conscious perception).
I just look quicly this Paulstretching technique and look very interesting !
And thanks for your words about meditation… I don’t always have the right words to express this state when I talk about drones. But ok, that’s the right word
If you still have the Lyra-8, I found it could be smoothed out with the NTS-1 “Cathedral” reverb (third-party, but free/donation) or the Source Audio Collider’s blackhole reverb emulation (called E-Dome). It’s really easy to lose an hour making tiny adjustments to knobs…
Will add to recommendations for Digitone as hardware that works well in this application. The @OscillatorSink drone tutorial linked above is a great practical demo on some routes to approaching this.
If approaching in software, I’ll typically use Operator or Grain Scanner and have been really enjoying this sequencer, designed for drones - Project: gtm.MIDIdrone | Cycling '74
Hi, I love droning ! I have three drone synths that I use regularly, the Russian synth is very brutal but thanks to the keyboard also musical, the little Box is very smooth and musical, and with the last one you can experiment a lot.
Analog Four is good for drones, using feedback and neighbour oscillators leads to really interesting results.
Any monosynth with a nice harmonic filter. My polivoks is lovely for drones, but maybe a bit noisy for what you’re after. Pretty.much any 2 oscillator synth will do though, it’s just about finding the filter/harmonics that suit your tastes.
don’t have one, but I’ve seen a lot of posts about how meditative it is to use.
